Review:

on 2011-02-28 CharlesMartel Said:

I honestly thought this sort of rock music had died back in the late seventies. It was therefore quite a surprise when I listened to the opening chords of "Blackfalds Revisited". It was like stepping back in time to my gap year when I travelled across Europe with a large orange nylon rucksack on my back. This was the sort of music which played on portable stereos and beatboxes all across Europe. I have to say that the listening experience was not entirely unwelcome.

So in a sense, listening to this album was something of a nostalgia trip. In fact, I had forgotten just how much fun this driving rock music could be. The vocalist sounds like Springsteen with laryngitis and the lyrics are often well constructed, full of clever imagery and themes. The opening track is perhaps quite pertinent today with the rise of fundamentalist Christianity in America - the protagonist meeting a disillusioned Jesus in a cheap hotel bar drowning his sorrows in cheap booze.

Musically, there is strong support to the opening title track from numbers such as "Lost the Best", which has a great riff, "Lost Cause" and "Driving". Unfortunately there are some weaker numbers too. "Whiskey" does not seem to have anything to say except hey guys this is strong stuff and I'm on my second bottle. "Slick Back Your Hair" is another weaker track, lyrically and musically. Long hair and handlebar moustaches create an imagery which is somehow inconsistent with the theme of the song. And as for "Secret Song", I still have not got it. The closest thing I can come to is that the words are actually being sung backwards - is this some sort of snub to the right wing lunatic fringe across the border? If you play this song backwards does it say:

"People who think rock is the music of Satan
Ought to be doin? somethin' other than hatin'"

Perhaps the most interesting things about this album are the associations which it conjures up in my mind. Although I have visited the North American continent on a number of occasions, the place is so vast that there are, inevitably, huge swathes of it about which I have little or no direct knowledge. Now lack of knowledge is a vacuum and nature abhors a vacuum. So, as is probably the same with everyone else, you fill in the gaps with suppositions and assumptions. Consequently, I have the idea in my head about what large swathes of (particularly) the USA are like. I imagine sprawling towns in flat plains with the 'wrong side of the tracks' home to various bars and clubs of the type exemplified by that one in the movie "Roadhouse". And in those bars are bands playing local bands made up of people who live in the area. And those bands sound exactly like The Frank.

In that sense, this album is familiar to me - it confirms my assumptions (or my prejudices if you find that my description of the blank bits on my North American travel experience is wide of the mark). Still, for all the flaws in it and the flaws in me when I listen to it, this is something worth listening to, though perhaps not as often as I once did when I was younger. It brings back memories of different times and conjures up images of places and experiences I have yet to encounter in real life. While it does contain songs with a message to say, in the end the album does not stretch the listener. But I doubt it was ever intended to.
Rating: 6/10